How your Thanksgiving cooking oil can be transformed into biofuel

Check out the Daily Herald article “How your Thanksgiving cooking oil can be transformed into biofuel” featuring the District and SCARCE’s cooking oil recycling program.

“Unlike SCARCE’s other drop-off locations, the center keeps the cooking oil it collects: It recycles and uses the resulting biofuel on-site.

“We use that cooking oil in our digester. It’s digested with the solids from our wastewater plant. Because the digester gets anaerobic, the bacteria in there produces methane gas, which we call biogas, or digester gas,” Underwood said.

The center uses the gas in its combined heat and power engines to produce electricity. When it has those engines running, the treatment plant is off the electrical grid and even sends power back onto the grid, selling it to ComEd.

“That’s another win for our customers, because that oil — even though it’s a tiny fraction of the gas — is saving them money because when we go to budget, we can budget a lower expense for electricity,” Underwood said.”

Read more at https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20231121/how-your-thanksgiving-cooking-oil-can-be-transformed-into-biofuel.

Don’t forget to recycle your used cooking oil with us at our administration center, 2710 Curtiss St., Downers Grove, this Saturday, Nov. 25 from 9 a.m. to noon.